Survivor: Zombies

Posted by John

The wife and I watched the recently-released-to-dvd movie Zombieland the other night and both quite enjoyed it. It followed in the same vein as Shaun of Dead in the newly successful arena of zombie spoof flick – plenty of camp, lots of gore, and an actual script that went behind just brain eating undead horror. Plus, Jesse Eisenberg turns in the performance of a lifetime by portraying if not the only, certainly the best onscreen character with IBS.

The premise of the film is pretty simple – some sort of ambiguous mad-cow-like disease turned one human into a zombie who then in turn spread the zombiness to just about everyone else on the planet in a matter of months. Now there are only a few people left trying to survive and hold on to their humanity. The main character, Columbus (named for his place of origin, Columbus, Ohio), has survived thus far by keeping a list of rules to avoid zombies that he holds sacred and unbreakable, that include among others:

1.     Cardio: You have to be able to outrun the undead.

2.     Limber Up: How embarrassing would it be to succumb to a zombie because of a pulled hamstring.

3.     Double Tap: When it comes to killing zombies, don’t be stingy on the bullets. Always shoot twice to make sure you’ve done the job.

4.     Be Careful of Bathrooms: zombies are mindless, not dumb; they’ll get you at your most vulnerable point.

5.     Don’t Be a Hero: How can you save humanity if you’re a zombie? Look out for number one first, just like the airplane safety warning – affix the oxygen mask to your face before assisting anyone else.

The movie doesn’t elaborate on all his rules of survival so it got me wondering what they might be and also got me thinking seriously about how I will survive when the inevitable zombie apocalypse occurs. But first, it’s necessary to separate zombie myth from fact.

The concept of a zombie first came about in Afro-Caribbean Voodoo lore as the idea of a person who is brought back from the dead and being controlled by a powerful sorcerer, but it wasn’t until the success of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968 that zombies really came to the forefront of popular culture and took on the foundation of what we now consider to be a zombie. No doubt popular culture has shaped the zombie over time through various movies, books, and comics like Romero’s Dead series, the 28 Days/Weeks series, I Am Legend, and the games-turned-movies Resident Evil series. While each director, author, and artist takes their own liberties with zombies, there are a few common themes:

-The Cause: Be it witchcraft, a virus, a biological weapon, or an alien bug, something either raises the dead or turns the living into the living dead.

-The Effect: once you go zombie you don’t go back. There is no cure, only the insatiable desire to consume human flesh, and in some cases, a particular affinity for brains.

-The Spread: A bite, blood transfer, or saliva; it requires contact with another zombie. To date I’m not aware of any zombie outbreak that has gone airborne.

-The Outbreak: It could be a few dozen, a few thousand, or the world’s entire population. The point is, it’s nearly impossible to contain once it starts.

-Mobility: The undead have definitely become more mobile as time has passed but they still remain stiff and awkward and easily outmaneuvered, except for the fact that they are apparently as silent as fucking ninjas and can sneak up on you wherever you are.

-The Solution: It’s hard to do, but you can kill zombies. Guns, bombs, bats, machetes; use them all and use them liberally.

So with that out of the way, I’d like to offer up a few of my own suggestions for surviving a zombie outbreak (In the interest of full disclosure, American author Max Brooks wrote the Zombie Survival Guide in 2003 which I have not read though plan to sooner than later. While some of my ideas may copy his, it is purely unintentional):

Choose Your Vehicle Wisely: I understand when you’re on the run from the undead there is a lot of security in a massive SUV with a ton of hauling capacity and more importantly, plowing capacity, especially if you prefer to kill your zombies without getting out of your car, and certainly this seems to be the norm for the protagonists in movies like Zombieland and I Am Legend. But let me just throw this at you – when you’re running from brain eaters while criss-crossing the country in search of the last vestige of humanity, wouldn’t you want to be getting 50 miles to the gallon instead of 15? The last thing you want is to get nabbed by a zombie while filling up at the petrol station, right? Doesn’t it just make sense to drive a hybrid then? [“Yeah, but it’s going to be really expensive when you have to replace one of those hybrid batteries.” Perhaps. But it will also be really expensive for you to replace your SUV when it rolls over a dozen times after hitting a pothole]. Plus, it’s one thing if you’re driving a huge carbon spewing SUV when everyone else is doing it because there’s safety in numbers, but when you’re the last person on earth, wouldn’t it be a bit ironic to be the one and only person ruining the eco system? How would you explain that to your future generations once you’ve staved off the zombies and repopulated the earth? “Yes, I realize I am solely responsible for repopulating the planet with all of you; the same planet I am also solely responsible for destroying because I drove that Chevy Suburban for all those years while I was fighting off the zombies, but it’s just that I really enjoyed the head room in that thing. Plus, I really feel a lot safer when I’m sitting up high on the road…”

Migrate to the South: When the man-made apocalypse inevitably happens due to global food, water or petrol shortages, a complete financial meltdown, the rapid dissemination of some sort of plague, or Barak Obama’s second term in office, I for one will be moving the fuck out of the South. Why? My neighbor owns more than 50 weapons including handguns, shotguns, assault rifles, and a 12’ long African hunting spear for some goddamn reason, and he’s always looking for an excuse to use them. I’m already worried about the outfall of shrapnel an stray bullets when a mouse unwittingly invades his home in the middle of the night sometime, so I’m positively terrified of what will happen when the apocalypse actually does occur. That’s why you’re going to see me in Canada where I need only my wits to survive, not a bulletproof vest. On the other hand, when the zombie apocalypse happens you better believe I’m going to hide in my attic until my neighbor becomes undead because, let’s face it, when it comes to avoiding the zombies these southerner rednecks don’t stand a chance; I mean, they’re practically the same thing, all moving real slow, mumbling nonsensical shit you can’t understand; a southerner can’t differentiate a zombie from another southerner. So when my neighbor eventually succumbs to the brain eaters I’m going to sneak up on him, knock his head off with my baseball bat, then raid his arsenal of weapons and ammo and then you better believe I’m going to stay in the one part of the world where there are more guns per capita than teeth. Remember Rule #3 above? Double tap - you can’t have too much ammo when it comes to fighting zombies.

Update Your Facebook Status: In the land of the living there is nothing more pointless than Facebook. But in the land of the living dead, Facebook could very well save your life. When the zombie outbreak occurs I for one will be signing up for Facebook immediately, friending a whole bunch of people, and then setting my status to “zombie”. That way, any zombies checking out their Facebook pages will be like, “Oh, someone already got to him; no point in bothering him now.” I’ll also get an iPhone and download the zombie app straight away so I can track their migration.

Go Vegan: This isn’t really a rule for survival but more just a suggestion for maintaining your sanity during an outbreak – have you ever been to like the Golden Corral and seen a guy eating a bacon-wrapped steak chili dog or something and thought to yourself, “wow, I am so disgusted I don’t think I’ll eat meat for a week”? Well imagine if that guy was a zombie and it was actually a spleen-wrapped brain chili dog. How gross would that be? It would be tofu and rice for me from there on out.

Find the Weakest Link: When you do come across some living humans among the zombies, do a quick analysis to figure out who is the strongest and who is the weakest among them. Then stay very, very close to the weakest of them. When the zombies eventually find you you’re really going to want a one or two person buffer; people you can easily outrun that will occupy the zombies’ time while you’re making your escape.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them: No, I’m not talking about giving up here. I’m talking about learning the one lesson Michael Jackson left behind that we can all learn from – no, not the one about not letting your kids sleep over at a suspected pedophile’s house; the lesson where he teaches us how to dance like a zombie in Thriller. Clearly the only thing zombies like more than eating flesh is dancing so if you can keep them cutting a rug, they won’t be gnawing on your frontal lobe.

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Again, I hope this was helpful and I hope you’re now thinking about your own survival when the zombie outbreak occurs. Just remember, when the zombies do come, if you happen to see me and I happen to be hanging out around you, you’re definitely the weakest link.